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MUSIC; Long Nights, Longer Days, All Filled With Music

EVERY year, around the summer solstice, this faded imperial city steps back into the limelight. On those long white nights, when the sun dips out of sight for only a few hours, crowds gather on the banks of the Neva River, even shabby hotels fill with tourists, and at the venerable Maryinsky (formerly, for a time, Kirov) Theater, the seats at the Stars of the White Nights festival are taken up by rich patrons from all over the world.

This is also the only time Valery Gergiev, one of the world's most sought-after conductors and the theater's artistic director, brings glamour to this gritty city with a pretty face, where czarist palaces share streets with Dickensian squalor, a city of giant potholes and columned facades, of high culture and low wages.

Seven years ago, Mr. Gergiev, then hitting his stride as director of the Kirov Opera, organized this festival in its current form with 14 opera and concert performances stretched over two weeks. This year, the festival was extended to a month, and featured 45 ballet, opera and other musical events, with two gargantuan productions -- Prokofiev's ''War and Peace'' and Wagner's ''Rheingold'' -- serving as operatic bookends, and guest appearances by international stars like Placido Domingo, Christoph Eschenbach and Riccardo Muti.

Behind the scenes, there were vague rumblings that maybe, just maybe, a month was too much. Even with the boundless energy injected by Mr. Gergiev, who was here only half of the time, it was hard to keep up a festival atmosphere for so long. Given that both the Kirov Ballet and the Kirov Opera (the companies use their Soviet-era names on foreign tours) were due for a five-week residency at Covent Garden, and the ballet decamped for London in mid-June, literally in midfestival, there was also the mundane question of the limits of the human body.

It may be, some here say, that even Mr. Gergiev has his limits, although few believe his latest, almost ritualistic pledge to slow down. Some worry, too, that the company, having shored up its reputation abroad with a series of triumphant tours, is beginning to show weaknesses at home, by relying too much on young, unseasoned singers, by not channeling enough creative energy into the ballet, by simply overwhelming its musicians.

But as backstage grumblings go, this is small stuff. Mr. Gergiev may not be the easiest conductor to work with in rehearsal, but it is hard to find anyone who denies him his talent as either a conductor or a manager.

And in St. Petersburg -- the city that Mr. Gergiev, an Ossetian from the North Caucasus by birth, adopted as a student at the Leningrad Conservatory -- people have grown used to living with a whirlwind in their midst and have even stopped marveling at the Maryinsky's stepped-up tempo.

''What kind of relationship can you have with a hurricane?'' asked the well-known St. Petersburg music critic Leonid Gakkel. ''There can't be any talk of love or hate. He is simply a force to be reckoned with.''

HALFWAY through the festival, after a performance of Prokofiev's ''Fiery Angel,'' Mr. Gergiev marched a group of friends -- Italian, German, American and British -- across the street for a midnight supper in the theater's new and elegant private restaurant, where burlap curtains are held back by pairs of pink ballet shoes and the walls are hung with opera props.

Clearly enjoying playing the host, the maestro fussed over the menu, chided the waiters, critiqued the decor for its deliberately half-finished look (''something like SoHo, no?'') and tended to his guests, toasting them with vodka and listening attentively as they rambled on about personal reminiscences of past operas.

But when he could, he returned to a favorite theme: his role as a cultural marriage broker. ''The festival is about what the West can bring to Russia and what Russia can bring to the West,'' he said in his perfect English, applying his fork and knife to his white fish in a caper sauce.

It is Mr. Gergiev's credo that friendship should be a two-way street. It is not enough, he says, for the Kirov Ballet and the Kirov Opera to dash around the world on back-to-back tours. It is not enough for Mr. Gergiev himself to make regular appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (where he is principal guest conductor) or the Rotterdam Philharmonic (where he is principal conductor), or to accept invitations at the great opera houses and festivals of Europe.

The other half of the bargain is that the West must come here. ''If I go to La Scala and they don't come here, that is not right,'' he said. ''That is not real friendship.''

''I told this to Volpe,'' he added, referring to the Met's general manager, Joseph Volpe. ''I said, 'If you and the Metropolitan don't come to St. Petersburg, I won't understand.' It sounded like a joke, but it wasn't. I believe in friendships.''

By Mr. Gergiev's reckoning, Russia -- so long held in isolation under Communism -- now desperately needs to reintegrate itself with the West, while the West just as desperately needs to discover the full richness of Russia's half-hidden musical heritage.

In this, the Maryinsky has been a trailblazer, blasting out new ground like a high-powered tank, adding seven or eight new productions a year to its repertory. It has resuscitated a languishing Mozart tradition and revived an old Russian love of Wagner, whose operas -- except for ''Lohengrin,'' which was staged at the Maryinsky in 1982 and revived in a new production at the festival last year -- had been purposely neglected by the Soviet Union's cultural commissars after World War II.

The Maryinsky was the first Russian company to jettison the Soviet habit of singing all operas in Russian. Now its singers get special coaching in Italian and German, and are able to give Russian audiences their first chance to hear lyrics as they were originally written.

In all this, the Maryinsky has moved far ahead of its old Moscow rival, the Bolshoi Theater, and Mr. Gergiev does not hesitate to gloat. ''I think the Kirov is good news for the Bolshoi,'' he said brightly. ''It shows them that it is not just the Met that can make a success. There is also the Kirov, right next door, that can do the same.''

But Mr. Gergiev has done more than anyone else, too, to retrieve Russia's own operatic heritage, reviving forgotten Prokofiev operas, like ''The Fiery Angel,'' which in 1991 took this city by storm with a finale overwhelmed by half-naked bodies writhing in religious ecstasy, just a few months after the final collapse of Russia's puritanical Communist party. Last year, it staged ''Semyon Kotko,'' Prokofiev's most Soviet opera, which swept Russia's top theatrical awards at the Golden Mask festival in Moscow last spring.

He has also revived old Russian classics. He brought home a production of ''Boris Godunov'' that had been directed at Covent Garden by the brilliant and doomed Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, breaking with a Soviet tradition that treated operas like pieces of petrified wood.

''In those days, there was no thought given to rejuvenating the repertoire or giving it any individual interpretation,'' said Mikhail Bialik, a professor at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. ''Most important was finding the correct way to present an opera, and once it was found, it was left alone.'' The Kirov's production of Glinka's ''Ruslan and Ludmila,'' he added, had not been touched for 90 years.

Mr. Gergiev's immediate predecessor, Yuri Temirkanov, made important changes to the repertory, but when Mr. Gergiev took over in 1988 at the startlingly young age of 35, he soon showed that he was ready to take astonishing risks. ''He is not waiting for anything,'' Mr. Gakkel said. ''He is not afraid.''

Mr. Gergiev prides himself on having concentrated his energy on the revival of the Maryinsky Theater. And typically, he has big plans for the future: to expand the theater across the canal that runs behind it, not to mention an even more ambitious scheme for a performing-arts center to be built on New Holland, one of St. Petersburg's many islands, now occupied by the Russian Navy.

His relations to the city are a bit complicated; his theater is federally subsidized and needs to look to the municipal administration only for token support. (It gave the festival $4,000 this year.) The city's current governor, Vladimir Yakovlev, a former highways supervisor, takes more pride in filling potholes than in attending cultural events (although he was in the czar's box at the Maryinsky for a performance of ''Rheingold'').

Built by Peter the Great as Russia's window on the west, St. Petersburg has long seen itself as more cultured, more civilized, better mannered -- in a word, more European -- than its rival, Moscow. The rivalry has political overtones. St. Petersburg lost its status as capital during the Communist period, but now, with a native son, President Vladimir V. Putin, installed in the Kremlin, it is being given occasional flashbacks of its former self-importance.

Twice, now, Mr. Putin has chosen St. Petersburg as the place to greet foreign visitors. Last March, when Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain came calling, the two spent the evening at the Maryinsky, in the czar's box, watching the premiere of ''War and Peace.'' The opera, staged by Andrei Konchalovsky, a Russian film director with a string of Hollywood credits, packs a bombastic patriotic punch in its second half, as the stage fills with loyal sons and daughters of Mother Russia, ready to defy Napoleon's invading army.

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Culturally, St. Petersburg is on a roll these days, with the Maryinsky providing the strongest push and Russia's greatest museum, the Hermitage, offering another powerful draw. ''Semyon Kotko'' was the Maryinsky's latest critical success; ''War and Peace'' got a more mixed reaction from Russian critics, although the barbs were saved mostly for Mr. Konchalovsky's staging, which some found to be half Russian, half Hollywood, and featuring the worst of both.

With Mr. Temirkanov now at the Philharmonic (dividing his time with the Baltimore Symphony), the quality of musical performances in St. Petersburg is considered to be as high as ever despite a decade of financial hardships.

Yet in most other respects -- economically, in particular -- St. Petersburg still lags far behind Moscow, a fact that may be overlooked by the well-heeled tourists. Taxi drivers here say they consider themselves lucky if they pick up a Muscovite. ''Muscovites are no different now from Japanese or Americans,'' one driver said. ''They all have a lot more money than we do.''

Mr. Gergiev knows better than most what it takes to manage a giant company in this kind of environment. ''Russia is not an easy place,'' he said. ''You cannot be successful in Russia unless you go to the limit of your ability. Here a lot of things are done on adrenalin. Adrenalin doesn't replace budget or talent, but it is important, because without it, people can get so hopeless.''

AT 2 a.m. a couple of nights later, as darkness finally began to fall on the banks of the Neva, Mr. Gergiev was wrapping up his last performance of the day.

He had breakfasted with a visiting German orchestra, led his own orchestra in ''Boris Godunov'' at noon, and at 7 p.m. conducted Stravinsky and Mozart at the Large Philharmonic Hall.

The final act took place here on the river, during a dinner cruise with several dozen Japanese, Mexican and American music lovers: members of Friends of the Kirov and members of a more select group, personal friends of Mr. Gergiev.

As the boat floated by faded imperial palaces into an evening sky exploding with color, Mr. Gergiev, out of his concert black, with a sweater dapperly draped about his shoulders, toasted his friends at the head table: among them Alberto W. Vilar, a wealthy investment manager and, since 1998, the Maryinsky's most generous individual sponsor. The toasts were out of earshot of the other guests, but it is safe to assume that Mr. Gergiev thanked his friends for their support, because without them, the White Nights festival simply could never happen.

''The festival, it is a killer,'' Mr. Gergiev, 47, said later, suddenly looking weary at the end of this, his second in a series of such midnight cruises. ''But we want to be able to invite our friends here, and we want them to love it. I never ask them for money, never. But they want to help us.''

That's easy for Mr. Gergiev to say, and practically impossible for any other leading cultural figure in Russia today. It is what makes him and his theater and his festival special, and it is one reason he has become such a magnet for musicians, singers and ballet dancers not only from across Russia or the former Soviet Union but also from the West.

In the early 1990's, when cultural institutions around the former Soviet Union were suddenly cast adrift, Mr. Gergiev went on an active recruiting campaign, picking up the best singers from operas in Kiev in Ukraine, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and other capitals of former Soviet republics.

One of his first moves back then was to increase the artistic staff by 30 percent. The total work force now is a hefty 2,000. The Maryinsky has two full-fledged orchestras, plus its own youth orchestra and a host of new and old opera stars, which give it the luxury -- and the glory -- of virtually nonstop world touring.

One vehicle for the training of future Maryinsky stars is an academy for young singers, directed by Larisa Gergieva, the maestro's sister, which provides accomplished singers with a secondary education that focuses on acting, language coaching and ''general culture,'' an attempt to broaden out the old Soviet narrow-gauge star system.

In these days of skimpy Russian budgets, foreign tours are what keep the theater thriving, and its artists and musicians alive: on state subsidies alone, their regular salaries would be a paltry 2,500 rubles, or about $80, a month. When abroad, the Maryinsky artists earn fees approaching Western salary levels.

To ensure quality, Mr. Gergiev says, the Kirov Ballet and the Kirov Opera have to be global. To be global, he has to offer quality. To have both quality and travel, he needs sponsors who will underwrite the theater's big, bold productions like the gargantuan $3 million ''War and Peace,'' by far the theater's most lavish production to date, and the long-awaited premiere of ''Das Rheingold.'' Mr. Gergiev's third Wagner production, the ''Rheingold'' is, moreover, merely the first installment of a ''Ring'' cycle, which he hopes to complete by 2003, when St. Petersburg celebrates its 300th birthday.

And he has found those supporters: individuals like Mr. Vilar, who has sponsored ''War and Peace'' as well as the Maryinsky's youth orchestra and its academy for young singers; foreign corporations like Philips (the general sponsor of Stars of the White Nights, and the Kirov's exclusive record label), Siemens (the sponsor of the Maryinsky Ballet's premiere this year of George Balanchine's ''Jewels'') and Daimler-Chrysler (the underwriter of the entire Wagner ''Ring''); and a few Russian companies, including the local brewery Baltica and the gas monopoly Gazprom.

For a theater that until a decade ago was entirely dependent on the government for money, the Maryinsky's success at collecting private sponsors is remarkable, not only by Russian but also by European standards. And it is owed entirely to Mr. Gergiev himself, whose near-demonic energy and magnetic charm are now legendary, both here and abroad.

Mr. Gakkel, the critic, applies the ultimate test. ''There is one very cruel way of weighing a person's value, which is to take him out of the picture and see if it makes any difference,'' he said. ''In this case, it is very simple. If there were no Gergiev, the Maryinsky Theater would not have survived.''

When he is in St. Petersburg, Mr. Gergiev's presence is unmistakable. (He insists, somewhat defensively, that he spends 260 days a year with the theater but is a bit more coy about how much of that time is in St. Petersburg.) Gianandrea Noseda, the theater's principal guest conductor, who came here from Italy in 1997 and sees his job as maintaining the level of tension and quality in the maestro's absence, puts it this way: ''When I am in the room, the musicians can feel it warming up. When the maestro is 20 minutes away from the rehearsal room, it is already hot. As soon as he arrives in the theater, everyone can feel it.''

The pace is punishing, but those who feel like complaining do so quietly. ''Sometimes they will say they are tired,'' Mr. Noseda said. ''But who can they say it to? They know I am in the theater 11 hours, and the maestro is the same, only worse. When he is in the city, he is in the theater every day from 12 to 3 a.m. Everybody knows that.''

Singers privately complain about the uncertainties that arise from Mr. Gergiev's inspired but erratic spur-of-the-moment decisions. There are also worries that the theater, in its eagerness to show off the young talent cultivated by Ms. Gergieva's academy, is neglecting its more mature singers.

Westerners who come here to take part in joint productions joke about having to defend the orchestra's ''human rights,'' noting that no Western musicians -- let alone their unions -- would tolerate such exploitation of their talents.

But there is another reason the Maryinsky bows to Mr. Gergiev's exacting demands.

''There is not a single institution at this level in the city, in the country,'' said Mr. Bialik, the music professor. ''Everyone wants to play with him. Of course they get very tired, but they don't want to leave. Where else would they go?

''Sometimes the first performance sounds like a general rehearsal, which is fine except for members of the public who are only going to come once. But in the end, there is no other way for the theater. This is the right way. If we are talking about Mr. Gergiev, he knows no other way. I remember him complaining once about having to wait in the Chicago airport for half an hour. He simply can't sit still that long.''

Mr. Gergiev himself tells the story that several years ago, a group of musicians -- call them an embryonic union -- complained about the workload. ''I told them, look, if the union doesn't want to rehearse, fine, I lose one rehearsal, but they lose everything,'' he said. ''I asked them, aren't we one family? I want to conduct the Kirov in Germany, but it has to be top quality. I said, O.K., we can cancel the tour to Germany, but if you want to go to Germany, then let's rehearse.''